Inspiration & Co talk no. 2 featuring Dr. Sam Ladkin for the University of Sheffield's School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.

2. [H]is is the Onanism of Poetry[…] Such like is
the trash they praise, and such will be the end
of the outstretched poesy of this miserable Self-
polluter of the human mind.
Byron on Keats
THE ART OF MASTURBATION
Sam Ladkin, School of English

3. But what more base, more noxious to the body
Than by the power of fancy to excite,
Such lewd ideas of an absent object,
As rouse the organs formed for noble end
To rush into th’embraces of a phantom,
And so do the deed of personal enjoyment.
William Farrer, A short treatise on onanism; or,
The detestable vice of self-pollution. Describing
the variety of nervos or other disorders, that are
occasioned by that shameful practice, or too early
and excessive venery, and directing the best
method for their cure, By a physician in the
country (London, 1767)

4. Anon. Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self
Pollution) [1712?]
Samuel Auguste Tissot, L’Onanisme; ou,
Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites
par la masturbation) [1760]

5. Michel Foucault:
[One] thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the
question of homosexuality to the problem of “Who
am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?”
Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “What
relations, through homosexuality, can be
established, invented, multiplied and modulated?

6. Richard Lovelace, from “Lucasta”
[1659]
Now on my Down I’m toss’d as on a Wave,
And my repose is made my Grace;
Fluttering I lye,
Do beat my Self and dye,
But for a Resurection from your eye.

7. Petrarch on Laura
from Canzoniere 30 (with prose translation)
mi piacquen sì ch’i l’ò dianzi agli occhi,
ed avrò sempre, ov’io sia, in poggio o ‘n riva
[Her speech, and face, and eyes] they so pleased
me that I have them before my eyes, and I will
always have them there, wherever I am,
whether on hill, or at the shore

8. “Why is she so cruel, he asks, in a fit of self-
abnegation. The answer, of course, is because
he has made her so, in a generic rather than
actual sense.”
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the
human body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995), 207.

9. “Youth is the seedtime of good habits, as well as in nations as
in individuals” – Thomas Paine
Michael Moon comments:
“What is merely analogical in Paine became reified in the
nineteenth century into a national preoccupation with the
“waste” of America’s “seed,” meaning both the country’s
promise and potential and the “reproductive secretions” of its
male citizens”.
Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in
Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 18.

10. Walt Whitman
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own
body, or any part of it,
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
[…]
You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
[…]
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious”
“I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.”
“The young man that wakes deep at night, the hand seeking to repress what
would master him, […] The pulse pounding through palms and trembling
encircling fingers, the young man all color’d, red, ashamed, angry”.
“[t]his poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men
carry”.

11. Walt Whitman
“Who touches this [book] touches a man.”
“My little books were beginnings – they were the ground into which I
dropped the seed”.
“Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,
That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,
For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.”
Quotations from Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856
ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York, 1980); Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman and the
Class Struggle (Iowa City, 2006); and Walter Lowenfels, with Nan Braymer, Walt
Whitman’s Civil War: Compiled and Edited from Published and Unpublished Sources
(New York, 1960).

12. The poem is of the same nature as central value, because
the whole function of its discourse is acknowledgement.
Consequently, universal access to the poem is a policy to
overcome scarcity. To effect this, Whitman devised a
“song” that would reconcile variety and order, equality
and constitution, one and many without compromising
either term.
Allen Grossman, “The poetics of union in Whitman and Lincoln”.
The American Reniassance Reconsidered, eds. Walter Benn
Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore, 1985), 192.

13. Derridean Hierarchies
Nature Sex Procreation Speech Presence
Culture Masturbation Representation Writing Absence
Writing “is dangerous from the moment that representation
claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself” (144)
See “That Dangerous Supplement” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), 141-52. Note should be made, too,
of Derrida’s the use of term “dissemination”, and the book of that title.

14. Rousseau: “Affecting oneself by another presence,
one corrupts oneself [makes oneself other] by
oneself [on s’altère soi-même]”.
As Derrida comments:
“Rousseau neither wishes to think nor can think
that this alteration does not simply happen to the
self, that it is the self’s very origin”. Of
Grammatology, 153.

15. And sexual auto-affection, that is auto-affection in
general, neither begins nor ends with what one thinks
can be circumscribed by the name of masturbation. The
supplement has not only the power of procuring an
absent presence through its image; procuring it for us
through the proxy [procuration] of the sign, it holds it at a
distance and masters it. For this presence is at the same
time desired and feared. The supplement transgresses
and at the same time respects the interdict. This is what
also permits writing as the supplement of speech; but
already also the spoken word as writing in general.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 154-5.

16. THIS PATHOS OF DISTANCE, BEING A THING INSIDE HIM ONCE I FELT
Arriving by night in sleeves to drape the need, coming from
somewhere deep inside this absence of birds. The shame in simply
being here. Being in my vapors, dim imaginations spooked by
cuffs and code, reviving now a tale of rapture, identity withdrawn,
murdered, as it were, by the secret heat of combat. Someone’s
inward hot desire, a lame expression of the need itself, this form,
my overproduction. We were once ourselves, but now, traversing the
trench, a fault between dim pockets of damaged life, I’m beginning
to feel something, a mind without sex, a shudder with no reference,
yr breathtaking crevasse, a loss I can’t mourn and which I’ve hastily
mapped onto this making of waste.
Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (Callicoon, New York, 2012), 11.

17. Voice offers the “bestowal of presence across
time” and “[t]he theater of that presence is the
poetic line”
Allan Grossman on Whitman

18. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe”
1. Apostrophe serves as an intensifier, “as images
of invested passion”.
2. Apostrophe is pervasive in lyric: “the lyric is
characteristically the triumph of the
apostrophic” over the narrative.
3. Apostrophe “makes its point by troping not on
the meaning of a word but on the circuit or
situation of communication itself.”
• Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe” Diacritics 7.4 (1977), 59-69 . Print.

19. Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism, with reference
to John Stuart Mill’s aphorism: the “lyric is not heard but
overheard”:
The lyric poet normally pretends to be talking to himself
or to someone else: a spirit of nature, a Muse, a personal
friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a
natural object…. The poet, so to speak, turns his back on
his listeners.
Quoted Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe” Diacritics 7.4
(1977), 59-69 (60)

20. [T]o apostrophize is to will a state of affairs, to
attempt to call it into being by asking inanimate
objects to bend themselves to your desire. In
these terms the function of apostrophe would
be to make the objects of the universe
potentially responsive forces.
Jonathan Culler, 61.

21. Moving in a halo of shame, the love of a militiaman,
democracy’s soul, a thing that fails to happen,
suspended in this mindless blow, incalculable
interval where we almost make contact with the
present. Singing in the fault of our temporal divide,
who will have been here to hear this. Mon petit
soldat, mon semblable yr touch makes me other
than the meat I am.
Halpern, Music for Porn, 101

22. Peter Coviello argues, “virtually every strand of
Whitman’s utopian thought devolves upon, and
is anchored by, an unwavering belief in the
capacity of strangers to recognize, desire, and
be intimate with one another.”
Peter Coviello, “Intimate Nationality: Anonymity
and Attachment in Whitman,” American
Literature 73.1 (2001). Print. 85.

23. Titian, Venus of Urbino [1538]
Uffizi, Florence

24. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus [1510?]
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

25. Édouard Manet, Olympia [1863]
Musée d’Orsay, Paris

26. Bibliography
• Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II, eds. Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (New York, 1995)
(which includes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s rightly renowned “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” (133-53)).
• Peter Coviello, “Intimate Nationality: Anonymity and Attachment in Whitman,” American Literature 73.1 (2001). Print.
• Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe” Diacritics 7.4 (1977), 59-69 . Print.
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976).
• Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London, 1981).
• Allen Grossman, “The poetics of union in Whitman and Lincoln”. The American Reniassance Reconsidered, eds. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E.
Pease (Baltimore, 1985).
• Rob Halpern, “Pornotopias,” Crisis Inquiry: A Special Volume of damn the caesers with attention to the work of Rob Halpern and Keston Sutherland
(2012), 97-114 (103). Print.
• Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (Callicoon, New York, 2012).
• Foucault, cited in Rob Halpern, “Realism and Utopia: Sex, Writing, and Activism in New Narrative,”Journal of Narrative Theory 41.1 (2011): 82–124
(113). Print.
• George Kateb, “Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” Political Theory 18.4 (1990), 545-571 (564). Print.
• Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York, 2004).
• Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (Iowa City, 2006).
• Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of A Style (Oxford, 1988).
• Walter Lowenfels, with Nan Braymer, Walt Whitman’s Civil War: Compiled and Edited from Published and Unpublished Sources (New York, 1960).
• Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London, 1966).
• Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
• Jonathan Sawday The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the human body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995).
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856 ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York, 1980).
• John Wilkinson, “Contemporary Lyric and Epic Constraints: A Reading of Rob Halpern’s Weak Link,” Chicago Review 55.2 (2010). Print.
• Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (London, 1990).